This website exists for two reasons;
The blog gets updated relatively regularly. Less often if I haven't been up to anything of note. The photos get added to whenever I go somewhere and take photos! The diary pages are an ongoing project, and I'm updating them as and when time allows. The maps page started off as an exploration of the Google Maps API, but may develop into something more useful or informative as time progresses. The page of links is pretty lame, but sometimes useful.
The appearance of the site may change from time to time when I update the Style Sheets. This generally happens when I want to try out something different.
The HTML and CSS are almost completely hand-coded, using the excellent text editor Notepad++. In addition to Google searches for "How do I do whatever" I spent a lot of time at W3 Schools which has the best tutorials I have found online. The rounded corners on the panels on this site are done using Version 0.11 of Ruzee Borders.
The photo pages are generated using Google Picasa, then I use a find & replace tool to switch out the default stylesheet with my own.
The blog is managed by Blogger, with a custom template and stylesheet.
The diary pages are generated by a server-side Perl script. The pages of the diaries were scanned and saved in day-of-the-year names files in year folders. The transcriptions are also saved as day-of-the-year files. The script then builds a web page that displays the correct page image, transcriptions (if any exist), previous and next page links and chucks in a calendar and other links for good measure. The first time the Perl script runs it will display the diary for 1986, open at today's date. It uses a cookie to remember the last page you viewed, and will open the relevant diary on the page on a subsequent visit. The only part of the Perl script that I did not write myself is the calendar generator. I used the CalendarMonthSimple module and adapted it to suit my needs.
The site images are all created using PaintShop Pro. It's not the greatest image editor out there, but it's relatively cheap and I've been using it (or at least versions of it) since about 1994.
I use the W3's HTML validator to sanity check the pages every now and then. I also test the pages in Internet Explorer and Firefox under Windows, since the logs for this site indicate that about 80% of you are using Internet Explorer, and 19% are using Firefox, both under Windows.